Your "Go To" Beer with a cigar?

[LaoFan]

On 5/21/2026 at 9:57 PM, JDoughty said:

So I make my own root beer, mostly with what I forage myself in the wild, but you could absolutely order the dry ingredients to your country or even source some comparably flavorful components locally. The syrup concentrate for this type of drink is easy to make; root and bark and hard, woody spice ingredients like seed pods go in a crockpot overnight and slowly steep. What I use to get the basic flavor profile rotates a lot depending on availability, but the general rotation includes shagbark hickory bark, black birch twigs, wild ginger (Hexastylis spp.), sassafras root, star anise, tonka (you could substitute vanilla), sometimes sarsparilla or our local wild relatives in the same family, but it's such a pain to dig and process it usually gets left out. Reduce the concentrate and add 1x sugar weight to make a heavy syrup. Bottle that and mix with sparkling water to drink. I added cedar smoked black trumpet mushrooms to one batch and it was pretty amazing. There's also a very fragrant bitter bolete in my neck of the woods (Pulveroboletus ravenelli) that works beautifully here, though it can not be added at the crockpot stage and needs to be extracted in after the initial reduction. Do you have a good local apothecary? Either black birch or sassafras or in a pinch just the shagbark hickory bark as a strong decoction will do as a recognizable flavor base for root beer. All are obtainable dried if they are not local to you. 

I'll have to give this a go. Definitely won't be foraging much in a big downtown China city, but I'll see if I can buy some ingredients and do a home brew. Appreciate it brother.

[JDoughty]

5 hours ago, LaoFan said:

I'll have to give this a go. Definitely won't be foraging much in a big downtown China city, but I'll see if I can buy some ingredients and do a home brew. Appreciate it brother.

Your local species is Sassafras tzumu. 檫木 or Chá mù. It should be available at an apothecary. Black birch or your nearest botanical equivalent is 黑桦木枝 (Hēihuà mùzhī - Black birch branches) or 兴安黑桦 (Xīng'ān hēihuà - Hinggan black birch). Either or both will be an excellent base for homemade root beer that closely approximates the classic old timey American root beer flavor profile. I would add 土茯苓 (Tǔfúlíng) which is your local Smilax species, sarsaparilla, plus a much smaller amount of liquorice root, dried ginger, star anise and tonka or vanilla. By weight, 80% or more of the dry ingredients should be some mix of the first three things, as many of those as you can manage (sassafras, black birch and sarsaparilla), with additional flavoring from liquorice root, dried ginger, star anise and tonka or vanilla. Tonka is 零陵香豆 (Línglíng xiāngdòu) or 汤加豆 (Tāngjiādòu). Don't use very much tonka in any given batch, though. An overdose of coumarin isn't super healthy. Half a bean will do you for a crockpot sized batch. 

I can step you through the specifics if you like but the basics are to crockpot cook the dried stuff in water for a day or two until you have a very strong decoction, then strain well and mix with equal weight in sugar for canning. You can adjust with some acidity at the end of the process, adding citric acid, lemon juice or even some lemon peel to steep in for a shorter time. 

When you are done water extracting the dry ingredients, don't toss them. You can either repeat the water extraction on higher heat for a longer time or do an alcohol extraction for delicious root beer bitters. 

[Çnote]

On 5/24/2026 at 2:12 AM, Nohiba said:

Me, I’m a Monkey Sacrifice type of guy. 

But in all seriousness, I have no idea if this is an officially licensed product, just thought you’d all get a kick out of knowing Cohiba is apparently making beer here in China 😂. 

Oh, I want this so much.

The Brisbane local brewery Felons makes a great alcoholic ginger beer which has proven a superb breakfast 👌 much in the line of @JDoughty homebrew madness which I will probably try later this summer.